Rev. Betsy Irvine has been affiliated with TBR through the Louisiana Delta Service Corps, University Presbyterian Church, and Humanities Amped. Her track record of leadership at multiple TBR member institutions speaks to a rich personal legacy of community work spanning spaces both religious and secular. Audio coming soon.

My dad was very involved in social issues. He was an institution man. He believed in community institutions. And he was a New Englander. I think that civic awareness comes easily to New Englanders, because everything is defined by ‘the town’, and the community.  He had a very clear, moral sense of community obligation, and that played out in many ways. When I was growing up, a lot of the work my father was involved in was about fighting redlining in the housing industry. I was pretty little, but what I remember were meetings that were held in our living room. My neighborhood was white but there were a lot of African Americans there, and I remember being like, Oh, this is interesting.

When I was at Yale Divinity School, William Sloan Coffin was the chaplain. Coffin was a very famous guy during the anti-war years. When I graduated, he told our class, “You will always have a job. You will not always be employed, but you will always have a job. There’s always work to do.” And that has been my mantra ever since. There’s always work that you are called to do. If you get paid, that’s great. And if not, you still do it. 

Before Baton Rouge, my husband Stuart and I lived in Atlanta, from 1981-1986. I grew to love Atlanta a lot. I had a wonderful job which, ironically, was with an early IAF organization—the Urban Training Organization of Atlanta. William Sloan Coffin had advised us, “When you arrive in town, find the people who are doing things that are interesting and really capture your vision, and attach yourself to them.” So, when I got to Atlanta, I met a guy named Calvin Houston. Cal was an African American Presbyterian Minister who ran the Urban Training Organization. I introduced myself to Calvin and I said, “I  want to hang out with you guys and shadow your work. Teach me. Plug me in where you can.”

In 1998, I had a sort of one-on-one with Maggie Richardson, who was acting as interim director of the Louisiana Delta Service Corps. She told me about what the work was like and she said, “I heard about you from someone else, and this looks like a really good fit.” She started to talk to me about it and I said, “Oh my goodness, this is exactly what I would like to do.” Because it was about promoting social change in the world, and it was working with young people, which I really enjoy doing. It’s that age group of college and a little after college that I really love. It was also working with lots of non-profits around the state, which I also really like, working with a variety of institutions. 

I think, with a lot of my work, I’ve found that I’m most comfortable when I am working between institutions as opposed to deeply in one institution. That’s why I never wanted to be a parish minister, because 95% of the time they work for their church. But it’s the work outside of the church that I care the most about. I love being in between institutions, understanding their different languages, doing the translation of the high ideals of one institution into the language of another.  

In 2008 or 2009, when I was still with the Delta Service Corps, I got a call from Brod Bagert. Brod came and talked about the IAF sponsoring committee in Baton Rouge. At the meetings he invited me to, I met and admired leaders such as Rev. Wesley, Rev. Knighton, Rev. Rushing and so many others. There was big name representation from both white and African American churches as well as lots of smaller institutions and it seemed to bring a different, fresh approach to the way people and institutions related to one another.  I was very interested early on and pleased that Delta Service Corps could join as an institutional member. 

Together Baton Rouge, it’s strength and what it means to me—I know there’s this mantra and the mission is creating these relationships, but you don’t just ‘relate’ to people, you deepen relationships because you have experiences together. We experience educational sessions together, we experience loss together. Like during the flood, just all those people coming to the office and working on the phones together, and sharing food and sharing call lists and celebrating together, and going to the capitol together, so that we share space, we share history, we share an experience. I think that’s the power of AmeriCorps, too. I mean, it’s those shared experiences and celebrations, and I think that’s how those relationships deepen.

I think being a leader is allowing people space to experiment and to practice and exercise leadership skills. There’s this kind of code about leadership in Together Baton Rouge. There’s ‘Leader’ with a capital ‘L’, and then there’s leaders with a small “l”. I understand that TBR needs the institutional leaders, they need the ministers of the churches. But I hope, that in the interest of having that titular leadership, that we don’t downplay the true leaders, the worker bee leaders, in different institutions.